Don't call it XCOM.

Reviewed on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360

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August 19, 2013

I played through The Bureau: XCOM Declassified's entire floundering tactical shooter campaign wondering how it planned to pull off a plausible prequel backstory to the freshly rebooted XCOM universe. When I got to the end, it didn't even seem to try, content to let us wonder why this 1960s version of XCOM didn't bother to tell 2010s XCOM (of XCOM: Enemy Unknown) that hostile aliens exist and that there's a closet full of working plasma guns somewhere. Not making sense doesn't seem to bother The Bureau, either in story or in its flawed attempt to use permanent death mechanics and strangely shoddy construction. But it sure bothered me.

If the alien-invasion plot could keep its act together for the course of its roughly 15-hour campaign and work as a stand-alone alternate universe, I'd be totally willing to ignore that admittedly nitpicky continuity issue. Alas, despite one really good idea that cleverly toys with the way we experience games through characters, it completely falls apart. The way main character Agent William Carter reacts to a major revelation is pretty much the exact opposite of what a sane person would probably do in that situation. It's to the point where I have to wonder if a bug might’ve caused the wrong dialogue option to be selected. This isn’t the only inexplicable moment in this baffling story, but it's the most spectacularly weird.

What does work, at a basic level at least, is The Bureau’s tactical combat. Like Mass Effect and Brothers in Arms, each mission against the alien invaders is a linear series of encounters where you and the enemy take cover and open fire, then try to maneuver to flank the other team or drive them from cover using grenades and special abilities. Most of those come from the two lightly customizable XCOM agents that accompany Carter on every mission, and each of the four agent classes has a set that unlocks as they level up in combat. They’re mostly useful: abilities like the Sniper’s critical shot and holographic distraction and the Engineer’s deployable turret and land mines can combine into some satisfyingly lethal crossfires and traps.

Squaddies are ordered around using a well-done UI, which allows you to easily set waypoints for your squaddies in the super-slowmo Combat Focus mode (somewhat reminiscent of Fallout 3’s VATS), which you can enable at any time. Its biggest aggravation is in how it sometimes refuses to let you throw a weapon without a walkable path to the landing point, but otherwise it’s a very capable tool.

In the other corner is a new alien race called the Zujari, a bland race that fights exactly like humans with advanced technology. Their minions – classic XCOM aliens like impish, mouthless sectoids, lumbering mutons, swift silacoid blobs, and flying drones – all have much more character. With several varieties of Zujari, though, the enemy diversity is respectable, and manages to keep fights from going stale too quickly.

Here's where it all falls apart: The concept of squaddie permadeath (borrowed from X-COM: UFO Defense and Enemy Unknown), simply doesn’t work properly in a game with one character that must live. Any situation where a fight went so badly that I wasn’t able to reach a downed squaddie before his bleedout timer expired was so bad I was probably doomed anyway. And when Carter dies, he and any dead squaddies are revived at the checkpoint to try again. It's a bizarre system that punishes partial failure more severely than total failure.

Of course, that’s all rendered nearly moot by a revival system that you have to consciously avoid exploiting. Even while they're being pounded on by a huge muton, your two agents can constantly revive each other in an absurd seesaw dance of perpetual near-death. Between those two goofy systems, I lost only two men on my Veteran difficulty playthrough.

Between missions you return to base to wander around and converse with other XCOM agents and scientists. The base is large, yet there’s not much to do there other than a couple of simple puzzles. The only thing you need to do there is equip your squad, another key idea borrowed from classic X-COM that’s reduced to pointless busywork by an infinite supply of clearly superior weaponry and a lack of a research mechanic (despite franchise tradition and an entire section of the XCOM base labeled as research labs).

Captured alien weapons aren't anything special, either. They have some flashy effects, but they're simply more powerful red- or green-glowing variations of ballistic firearms, and none stands out as the slightest bit distinctive. Even the Blaster Launcher is nothing but a green rocket launcher.

I can give the Bureau credit for its 1960s setting, which looks pretty good thanks to fine detail in both the base and the towns and rural farms you’re sent out to liberate. A farm mission stands out as particularly atmospheric, with battles playing out from behind tractors and bales of hay, leading to an unexpected hidden area. Scattered notes and voice recordings from civilians succumbing to an alien virus give it a touch of real creepiness. Characters' faces aren't bad, though not particularly well lip-synced to their mostly wooden voice acting. It's commendable that conversations can play out in dramatically different ways based on early conversation choices, such as whether you play good cop or bad cop in an interrogation. I can’t say I have any desire to replay The Bureau, though.

There are a few in-mission interactions with NPCs where you have to make decisions on whether to help them or not. But the Bureau handles these poorly, in that there are no apparent sacrifices to be made in order to assist them and no selfish advantage to be gained in not helping. So the choice boils down to help or be a jerk for no reason.

Even in the moments of atmospheric success, though, there are a ton of sloppy little things that undermine the consistency of the setting, kind of like seeing a biopic in which Abraham Lincoln wears Google Glass. In the very first mission an XCOM agent has a deployable laser turret, despite never having encountered alien weapon technology before. And suddenly, in the middle of a mission, I unlocked abilities that allowed me to toss out a friendly version of alien blobs and drones. There’s no mission to obtain the skills, no interaction with a Q-like scientist back at base explaining that he’s figured out how to control the alien technology. The Bureau just says, "Bam, you can do that now." Oh, and in a few places cinematic sound effects are straight-up missing. That’s just ridiculous.

The Verdict

Don't call this XCOM. While its tactical combat works well enough to prevent The Bureau: XCOM Declassified from being straight-up bad, everything else is fumbled so often and so bizarrely that I can’t recommend it. Hell, this prequel can’t even manage to explain where the name XCOM comes from even as it shows it being coined – it’s simply pulled out of thin air. That shoddy storytelling and poorly thought-out mechanics become the most memorable thing about it, and that’s not worth much.